Iterations, Chapter Two

It looked to Sonica like Mini-Flash Splitsville was headed for one of those planned communities where grubby labouring people built starships. There it hung, a great pod in space, rising tier by tier with an interconnecting road wound about it in a spiral. From the left, ominous neon clouds alive with lightning stretched their thick stormy feelers near.

The rogue racer hit the entrance-ramp and Sonica wasn’t far behind. Giving chase on the lowermost strip of highway, which hugged the broad base of this gigantic buoy, she let go the controls and thrust her lacquered nails deep into specially-crafted apertures on either side of the dashboard. Sonica’s command of auditory harmonics wasn’t anything to speak of on its own, but with proper amplification, look out universe.

A chord like twelve fingers jamming on some brutal synthesizer’s bass shook the foundations of the shipyard, as Sonica’s stereo-systems let rip with concentric circular vibrations visible to the naked eye. These tintinnabulating tubes tore in the direction of Splitsville’s rear fins, gouging U-shaped gullies in the asphalt and prompting some slick steering and speedy swerves.

“Lady’s really putting something down,” muttered the Mini-Flash. “Only here outside of Planet Square it’s strictly one sonic shower a day.”

She stood in her seat, preparing to waft a portal backward into the pursuer’s path, her silvery hair and tunic-skirts catching the slipstream. All at once Joe wondered whether Scientooth’s version of events was a side-scroller rather than a first-person. The former would have been his preference, over staring at his most promising pupil’s intimacy for this chapter of the narrative.

Especially, knowing as Joe did, what was to happen in certain later ones.

He turned to see, and was satisfied. There in Scientooth’s sixteen-bit sixty-four colour world, two little graphical girls and their respective rides pinged about the stage while infinite identical streetlamps flitted by. Sonica, bringing up the rear, loosed at Splitsville those chains of sound-rings which on connecting with the latter did her life-gauge some damage. She however was able to stand and drop intercepting portals which pinged the strings back at their source, making Sonica’s saloon briefly flicker in and out of existence and its pilot palpitate in suitably frazzled fashion.

It was almost restful, Splitsville’s sprite evading and redirecting and gradually whittling Sonica’s energy-bar. Joe felt he was watching Scientooth take his turn.

As if it were so, that one did not pivot to look away from the monitor. At length however he asked aloud:

“Less comfortable than you imagined, within your chosen perspective?”

No machine should have been capable of the salaciousness with which Scientooth suffused his last word. “Merely relishing a rare opportunity to understand you better,” Joe said shortly.

“Then in the parlance of your homeworld, the feeling is mutual,” came back the smug reply.

Sonica was through. Her disarrayed animation had gone from fleeting to permanent, and yellow-red explosions were blossoming along her chassis. Quite why Scientooth had felt the need to compose a soundtrack in the first place was more than Joe or anyone knew, but now his in-game music deepened to a heavy portentous tone.

Joe for his part reverted to Sonica’s point of view. This next segment might be best witnessed through her eyes, since it had most concerned her.

Rumbling up from the thunderous distance, a beast of a space-rod was eating air and chewing concrete. Iron exhaust-pipes snorted and throbbed from beefy bodywork of midnight purple. The face behind the wheel was great-lipped, green and huge about the sloping brow, above which towered thick black hair gelled to a rock-solid pompadour. Sonica’s subjectivity as she beheld this ghastly apparition bearing down upon her was such that Joe opted on second thought for Scientooth’s far less threatening two-dimensional avatar of the same.

From the left-hand side of that one’s screen it beetled into view. Horizontal electricity whipcracked at either end, temporarily shorting-out Splitsville’s transmission whilst Sonica’s crippled car stood no chance. She went down, the teenage Frankenstinium following. For a second their sprites overlapped as he scooped her out of her seat. Then taking her with him he exited stage-right, poor Sonica protesting through both her bouncing skirt-fluttering frames.

So much for Level One.

Joe pointed again, illuminating a third panel on the wall.

“Next this, from Flashstanch,” said he, while wondering whether Akira Kurosawa had had these troubles.

Contamination arrived, and he’d looked better. Quickly Flashstanch sealed the bulkhead doors behind him to keep out the storm. She knew he himself was the fuel for that old custom-job of his, and battling through the elements had obviously taken its toll on both. Bonkers of him not to turn back, and Flashstanch didn’t mind telling him so.

“I’m going straight out there again, Mini-Flash,” was the shrill reply. “Someone has to, if we’re to set this shambles to rights.”

“Er, you’re so not,” Flashstanch corrected him. “Have you seen the state of you?”

From his space-racer Contamination took a pyramidal recording-device and rammed it into the nearest socket, while saying something characteristic about introducing the individual their little friend was so wisely taking on single-handed. Flashstanch gaped on first sight of the holographic armature. True, as far as Handsome himself went she’d not had the pleasure, but her run-in with two older creatures of comparable good looks she wasn’t likely to forget.

“Your friends,” Flashstanch breathed. “We fought them, along with the others who’ve started working for Antroar. That couple who somehow looked like they were first and second gender. You’re not telling me he’s their son?”

“He is,” Contamination confirmed. “As it happens his parents dislike each other, but they’ve never let that get in the way of offspring. He’s easily as dangerous as either of them, so if you cast your mind back, my instruction you weren’t to face him without me might just start to make sense.”

So saying Contamination swung himself back into the one-seater, and with a pulse of blue-white phosphorescence reignited its reactor-core.

“Just be ready to make yourself useful when we need you, female,” was his parting shot.

Now Flashstanch loved the first gender. Unlike most girls, she wouldn’t hear a word against them. But seriously. Ask her why her type was someone more like Flashtease.

END OF CHAPTER TWO